This recognition is a major achievement. Congratulations to the many internal teams, partners and customers that participated in the efforts to make WSO2 the only open source vendor evaluated in the report.

Nuwan Dias, WSO2’s product lead for APIM gave a tour-de-force 2-hour non-stop demo demonstrating raw software athleticism. Also, I’d like to tip my hat to Randy Heffner and the Forrester team for structuring a thorough (and frankly, exhausting) analysis that assuredly left no stone unturned from any vendor.

The API management market is growing because IT professionals see APIs as a critical foundation for agile software to support customer engagement, operational excellence, digital transformation, and business agility.

Forrester states why APIs are essential: “The API management solutions market is growing because more AD&D pros see APIs as a critical foundation for agile software to support customer engagement, operational excellence, digital transformation, and business agility.”

API management has become an essential part of every integration strategy and it’s why WSO2’s APIM solution is fundamental to how we help organizations become integration agile.

What Forrester Says About WSO2

“WSO2’s open source solution provides a solid base for a variety of API strategies.”

“[WSO2 is] the only fully open source solution in our Forrester Wave analysis.”

“WSO2 provides good breadth across all evaluation criteria.”

“[WSO2’s] strengths include formal life-cycle management and non-REST APIs, both of which facilitate mature and disciplined enterprise API strategies.”

“WSO2’s solution provides flexibility to address a variety of approaches to APIs.”

“The reference customers provided by WSO2 are highly satisfied with its solution and very satisfied with the vendor.”

“[Customers] tend to be very to extremely satisfied with the product’s detailed features and functions.”

What Is Special About WSO2

In addition to the demo and a (many 100s) questionnaire, we delivered a summary presentation to Forrester’s team discussing our market penetration, product composition, and long term thinking.

WSO2 API Manager: The only comprehensive open source solution has been shipping for 6 years

API Management provides full lifecycle management of APIs for a variety of scenarios, whether B2B access, internal development, shared libraries, or monetization. WSO2 has been shipping our offering for 6 years and it has expanded to include a macro and micro gateway, embedded analytics and API identity, and API development tooling. WSO2 was the only vendor whose entire stack was both open source and available in on-premises or cloud offerings.

WSO2 provides a complete set of capabilities that allow customers to pursue any kind of API strategy. We front-end our offering with our ESB, identity server, and embedded analytics offerings to provide means to digitally transform legacy infrastructure into APIs.

More than 100 billion transactions run through WSO2 each day.

We are fortunate to have customers that participate in our conferences, give case studies and act as references. More than 30% of our API customers are financial services institutions. Starting small, our API management business is growing more than 75% each year and makes up 1/3 of our business.

What Are WSO2’s Big Bets

Forrester evaluates 26 criterion around the vendor’s current offering, strategy, and market presence.

Expect an increasing proliferation of digital endpoints, APIs, and applications that consume APIs. There is an integration economy that will grow exponentially with endpoints in the trillions, driven by edge computing, IoT, SaaS-SaaS integration, AI, machine learning, cloud computing and serverless.

APIs and digital endpoints will have an increasing diversity of origin. Different groups and personas will be creating APIs whether they are developers, knowledge workers or self-actualizing systems. There will be different locations where APIs reside, internal, external, on the edge, or in the cloud. And the structure of APIs will diversify taking construction from streams, events, async, and new protocols.

Expect the rise of dynamic APIs: short-lived, with frequent changes to facility agility. Microservices drive needs for fast-boot, low footprint, containerized services and some architectures requiring a microgateway per API. This creates change management and deployment problems for DevOps.

A need for adaptive management of APIs due to their proliferation and dynamism. Integral monitoring and management needed across diverse API origins. This amplifies demand for dynamic and federated identity, token swapping and SSO integration along with decentralized observability and monitoring with tools that keep pace with API rate-of-change.

These dynamic conditions allow us to invest into features that enable micro API management in environments that have thousands of constantly changing and distributed APIs.

Rethinking API Development and Lifecycle With Ballerina

Starting three years ago, WSO2 began working on Ballerina. It’s a new programming language that is designed to be the best language for writing services that need to talk over the network. Ballerina’s launch earlier this year has received a number of accolades, has grown in adoption, and now has multiple enterprises using it to build service-based architectures.

A service, or an API, is a first class concept within the language. Ballerina is a compiled, strongly and statically typed, concurrent language. The language provides modern benefits of structural programming without requiring significant scaffolding to resiliently (load balance, fail over, transaction, payload management, and error conditions) build and talk to APIs.

Ballerina dramatically improves developer productivity by making API iterations fast and agile. Ballerina has a built-in API gateway and is designed to plug any services built by Ballerina into an API management solution, or drag along a micro gateway. Essentially, the Ballerina language and compiler are distributed systems aware, and prepare the artifacts made by developers to be API management ready.

Get Started with WSO2’s API Management Offering

WSO2 is now the world’s 6th largest open source software company. Our significant size and staff (600 employees!) allow us to run a 24/7 operation with a global reach. We have sold and delivered into 63 different countries with offices in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, United States, Sri Lanka, Australia, and Germany.